


Smile!

by NightmareAntagonist



Category: Asagao Academy: Normal Boots Club
Genre: Gen, happy freaking friendship time yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 05:05:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8735968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightmareAntagonist/pseuds/NightmareAntagonist
Summary: Sometimes the things that we aren't supposed to see are the most important ones for us to find. Maybe they'll even help bring a friendship forward. All you know is that you shouldn't have been poking around the files on Ian's laptop, but at the same time you were definitely glad that you did.





	

You always felt really lucky having the friends that you did. They helped you out whenever you ran into a problem, whenever you needed some help with pretty much anything, there was always someone there when you had a problem you couldn’t fix yourself alone.

Which was why you were now sitting in the dorm room of Ian and Luke while the boys where in the club meeting, trying to get Ian’s ages old laptop to connect to the Internet.

The frustration was clearly in the air around you as you sat in the room alone, staring at the screen as it hit you with connection error one time after another. Damn Ian and his eternal love for old nostalgic technology, it always seemed to come back to bite you in the behind somehow. Whether it was his slow laptop that he could have more than way easily trade into a new, high tech one with the funds he had running in the family, his phone that you sometimes had to lend when yours ran out of battery and everyone else seemed to disappear from the face of the Earth, when you wanted to listen to music and all he had was a portable cd player that you literary didn’t know what to do with.

Ian had this weird fascination to old tech that you would never understand, but you always found endearing on some level. However, it seemed to be far more pain in the ass these days than all fun in games, as you let out a deep, frustrated sigh at the sight of another error message popping up on the laptop screen.

If only you would have gotten the hang of any other of your friends to lend their laptops to you since yours encountered an error that meant sending it out for repairs, as you had an essay to finish by the end of the day. Unfortunately for you, so seemed so many others, so nobody else could help you out. Apart from Ian since you promised to him to have your work done while he was in the club meeting, but again, it had all proven to be way more of a trouble than actually getting any writing done.

You clicked the error message away, clicking around the settings for a while before letting it try to reconnect. You had nothing to go with at the moment, you had already spent more than enough time messing around with the minimal amount of games on his laptop and won solitaire more than what seemed like million times already. It was getting really tiring looking for something to do while the connection was just hitting errors time and time again, before being thrown into the endless loop of trying to fix the problem with an error scan that took way too long every single time you ran it through.

You were getting annoyed and there was nothing you could do about it. You just aimlessly clicked around on his desktop, that barely had anything on it apart from the usual stuff of the home folder link, the trashcan…

And a folder just simply titled ‘ian’ that you assumed held inside of it all his personal files that you didn’t want to touch, out of respect of his privacy.

With a sigh you lowered your head on the keyboard, listening the quiet humming of the laptop fans. You were starting to get tired of waiting, not the mention you were running out of time as the club meeting was coming to an end at any point now, meaning that Ian and Luke would be back sooner than you’d be able to finish your work. Not that either of them would probably mind having you around and have a long night ahead of yourselves to get some school work done, but you have promised to be done before they came back. And you hated breaking promises, even if it was small ones like that, and probably didn’t matter to the guys at all.

You moved your head a little as you yawned, hearing a quiet clicking noise coming from under your forehead. You lifted your head up quickly, eyes widening as you watched the screen shift, as you had accidentally pressed something on the keyboard in your spur of ultimate boredom, clicking open the folder on the desktop.

Your hand quickly reached for the mouse, hovering it over the red X located in the top corner of the new window, but you stopped yourself from clicking as your eyes wandered over the contents of the folder. You had been right in guessing that it was a personal folder, sure, but the content was different from what you had been expecting. Instead of files like school work and such, it was filled with photographs and pictures instead.

You didn’t want to seem like a snooping person, but something about the photos just really caught your eye. You carefully hovered the mouse cursor over the first picture of the folder, double clicking it open. It took a moment to open on the old piece of hardware, but eventually you were met with a nice picture of Ian, standing there in his Asagao Academy issued school uniform, looking like he was prepping for the school on the first day of his first year.

It all looked relatively normal to you. Apart from the facts that he wasn’t wearing his Hidden Block Club jacket that you had gotten so used of seeing him in…

And that he was actually smiling.

It wasn’t the forced kind of smile you were used of seeing on him whenever he had to deal with stupid stuff coming from his fellow club members. It wasn’t sarcastic, it wasn’t one he tried to hide like you had seen him done multiple times in the past - it wasn’t because Ian wasn’t a happy person, he just came across as someone who didn’t smile and tried to keep it that way since that was what people were used to at this point.

It was the most genuine smile you had seen from him… Pretty much as long as you could remember. He looked so happy in the picture, at the dawn of a new chapter in his life, feeling happy and positive about his choices in life. Maybe it had ultimately been Asagao and the friends he made here that brought out the cynical, sarcastic young man out of him again, but that didn’t matter at the moment.

He was looking so happy, happier than you had ever seen him be.

You clicked the picture away, moving on to the next one. Maybe you shouldn’t have, but seeing one happy picture of Ian like this made you really wonder what other secrets you could cover from this single photo folder. Of course you were aware that you should respect his privacy, but all you were doing was looking through simple photos, and if there was something he didn’t want you to see, he would have hidden them better than leaving them on an accessible folder on the desktop of his laptop.

Photo after photo you were met with the kind of Ian you hadn’t seen before, or that was a really rare thing that you didn’t encounter often enough to really have a memory of it. But here he was, smiling and laughing, hanging out with his old friends and family members, seemingly having the time of his life with everyone he was with.

As you clicked on another photo, you heard the door click open behind you.

You could feel yourself tense up as Luke’s voice reached your ears, he was laughing at something on Ian’s expense again, obviously. You quickly clicked the pictures and the folder shut, one hand reaching for your pocket as you pulled out your phone while spinning the chair around, meeting the faces of the two confused looking young men as they stepped inside the room, Ian raising a brow at you as he was sure you should have already been done with your work and out of the room.

“Luke, help me a little,” you smiled at the two of them as you readied your camera’s photo, lifting it up towards the two of them. Ian started blankly at you, trying to pick up the pace of the situation while Luke was already one step ahead of him, one of his arms wrapping around Ian’s shoulders while his other hand pressed on his face, slightly forcefully lifting the corners of his mouth into a forced grin.

“Stop,” Ian muttered as he tried to swat Luke’s hand away, the other man only laughing at him as you snapped a photo of the two of them just barely seconds before Ian managed to push Luke away.

Sure it wasn’t a genuine smile you two got out of him, but for now it would have to do. Eventually you were sure you could get a picture of him actually smiling, like he did in the pictures on his computer.


End file.
